Intel will begin high-volume manufacturing of chips featuring the world's first three-dimensional transistor, the company said Wednesday.

"The gains these transistors provide are really unprecedented," said Bill Holt, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's technology Manufacturing Group at a press conference in San Francisco.

Intel will introduce its 3D transistor design, called Tri-Gate, as it transitions to its next-generation, 22-nanometer silicon manufacturing process at the end of this year and through 2012, Holt said. Tri-Gate transistors will be used in all of Intel's product lines, from high-end server chips to the tiny, low-power processors that go into mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, including the Atom embedded processor. The 3D transistor will be a standard part of Intel's 22-nm process, and its factories will be upgraded to support the new technology, executives said.

The first 22-nm chips are codenamed "Ivy Bridge" and are set for high-volume production before the end of 2011 with a scheduled product release early in 2012. Intel demonstrated working Ivy Bridge chips in a notebook, desktop and a dual-core, single-processor server at the San Francisco event.

What's a 3D transistor?

Although a traditional transistor is built three dimensionally, it operates in a "planar" fashion, moving electrons across two dimensions.

Tri-Gate transistors form conducting channels on three sides of a vertical "fin" structure, a major advance from the planar design of transistors in use for the past 50 years, the company said. The three-dimensional structure of the next-generation transistors allows chips to operate at lower voltage with lower leakage, Intel executives said.

In other words, the electrons go "up, left, and down," said Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager for the Intel Architecture Group, at an event in San Francisco Wednesday.

Intel said its upcoming 22-nm chips will enjoy a 37 percent performance gain running at low power as compared with the company's current-generation 32-nm chips featuring planar transistors. The new chips also provide a 50 percent power reduction at constant performance, improved switching characteristics and a higher drive current for a given transistor footprint.
"We've never achieved that any kind of performance gain on anyt previous technology," Bohr said.

What this means for your PC

What will this mean for the PC? Intel's second-generation Core i7 processors top out at 3.4 GHz, although some of Intel's server chips can run faster. Perlmutter said that the improved transistor will result in improved processor performance, although he declined to say whether clock frequency would be increased as a consequence. Users should also expect Intel's notebook chips to run at even lower power consumption at the same clock speed, potentially extending battery life further.

All those benefits do come at a price, though not a terribly steep one. Silicon wafers with Tri-Gate transistors will cost from 2 to 3 percent more to fabricate than traditional wafers featuring planar transistors, said Mark Bohr, an Intel senior fellow who spoke at the event.

Intel's 3-D Tri-Gate transistors enable chips to operate at lower voltage with lower leakage, providing an unprecedented combination of improved performance and energy efficiency compared to previous state-of-the-art transistors. The capabilities give chip designers the flexibility to choose transistors targeted for low power or high performance, depending on the application.

The 22nm 3-D Tri-Gate transistors provide up to 37 percent performance increase at low voltage versus Intel's 32-nm planar transistors. This incredible gain means that they are ideal for use in small handheld devices, which operate using less energy to "switch" back and forth. Alternatively, the new transistors consume less than half the power when at the same performance as 2-D planar transistors on 32-nm chips.

Intel first demonstrated a single-fin Tri-Gate transistor in 2002. Just shy of a decade later, the chip maker will introduce the first chips featuring its 3D transistor technology in a server chip due out before the end of the year.

Bohr said Intel could enjoy a three-year lead on competitors with its Tri-Gate transistors. Semiconductor manufacturers planning on introducing 3D transistor technology likely won't do so until they move past the 22nm process node to 14nm several years out, he said. Intel's Tri-Gate process is also extensible to the 14nm manufacturing node.

"This general structure is well known in the industry. But the challenge is to make it manufacture-able," Bohr said.

Executives at AMD deferred comment to their manufacturing partner, GlobalFoundries, which didn't have any immediate comment.

For the Atom, too

Perlmutter added that the Tri-Gate technology will be used on the Atom chip, Intel's plan to attack mobile devices with Intel silicon. That strategy has struggled, as the Mobile Internet Device category has yet to catch on, and tablets and phones have generally used low-power embedded chips based on ARM designs. But Perlmutter said that users and OEMs should expect Intel to apply its "tick-tock" manufacturing strategy to the Atom processor, following up a new revision of the design with a mnaufacturing improvement that increases clock speeds.

"We think improved process technology is necessary to compete across the market, not just in the PC," Perlmutter said. He didn't say whether the transistor would be also used in chipsets or other logic chips that Intel manufactures.

"I think we're going to be extremely competitive versus what an ARM can do," Perlmutter added, when asked about comparative performance.

Intel's transition to 22-nm technology later this year will be the next milestone in the company's Moore's Law-driven march towards ever-smaller silicon transistors that boost the performance and efficiency of each new generation of microprocessors.

"For years we have seen limits to how small transistors can get," said Intel co-founder Gordon Moore, in a statement. "This change in the basic structure is a truly revolutionary approach, and one that should allow Moore's Law, and the historic pace of innovation, to continue."

Editor's Note: This story was updated at 11:58 AM with additional details.

About the Author

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Ch... See Full Bio

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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